How much more power will the secret services accumulate before we begin a
serious debate about the usurping of democracy by a national security state?

The detailed revelations on the NSA's Prism programme are shocking on many
levels - from the sheer scale of domestic and international surveillance,
through the years of official denials that such capabilities were being put in
place, to the total lack of accountability at a congressional and
parliamentary level, as legal protections and basic human rights to privacy
are trampled into the ground.

What should be even more disturbing is that Prism is only one element of a
global electronic surveillance system constructed by the NSA to ensure US
supremacy in intelligence-led warfare, using special operations forces and
armed drones.

Both the Bush and Obama administrations have expanded the funding of the
major intelligence agencies, including the NSA and the National Reconnaissance
Office (NRO), to what is now a collective budget of over $80 billion a year.

The objective is to move beyond their traditional military, commercial and
diplomatic espionage functions and to build a fully integrated network,
combining the interception of all forms of electronic communications with
highly detailed satellite imagery.

Ultimately, this will provide real-time intelligence to identify targets
and to carry out attacks anywhere in the world without the need for
conventional ground forces.

Britain plays a vital role through Menwith Hill, one of the largest of the
NSA's regional electronic spy bases.

Located in North Yorkshre, it has undergone a vast expansion of its
surveillance capabilities, combining satellite and fibre-optic
telecommunications interceptions, with extraordinary computing power and
analytical support, in one of the largest and most sophisticated technological
programmes ever seen in Britain.

Nominally an RAF base, the majority of the staff are US personnel from the
NSA and commercial contractors like Lockheed Martin.

Britain is represented through GCHQ operatives but access to satellite
communications and computer analysis is reserved exclusively for senior US
staff.

Intelligence assessments are directly fed to the NSA headquarters at Fort
Meade, along with those from other major regional centres in Hawaii and
Australia, to ensure global coverage.

And there you have it - the basic structure of a national-security state.

All private communications are routinely intercepted in ways that can be
used to profile ordinary citizens involved in domestic political activities,
while the whole planet becomes a permanent remote-control battlefield for
secret operations against military and civilian targets.

The intelligence high priesthood takes on the roles of judge, jury and
executioner, while any criticism of this extraordinary accumulation of power
is simply rebuffed by the incantation of that ultimate gagging order -
"national security" and the threat from global terrorism.

In historical terms, the war on terror is simply the most recent
manifestation of Western power projection to legitimise military interventions
and support for authoritarian governments.

Often, those classified as terrorists are opposition groups with genuine,
popular support against corrupt regimes and where anti-Western sentiments are
fuelled precisely by the sorts of attacks, like drone strikes, that result in
the deaths of innocent civilians.

Terrorists can and do carry out despicable acts of individual violence, as
at the Boston marathon and Woolwich, but this does not constitute an
existential threat to our way of life from a global enemy.

Far from protecting us against terrorism, the national-security state is
enslaving us with secret courts, new powers of arrest and detention and
restrictions on assembly for political protest that can only lead to further
invasive surveillance in a spiral of authoritarianism.

Can we reclaim democracy when faced with such unaccountable power?

Looking back on the emergence of the modern nation state, there have been
crucial periods when radical reforms were made and enshrined in legislation.

Perhaps the best example is the Bill of Rights in 1689, where the king
could no longer raise a standing army without the authority of Parliament.

Absolutism was effectively replaced by constitutional government.

A modern Bill of Rights would re-establish the primacy of the people's
interest over the state.

At its heart would be the right to privacy and a highly restricted role for
the security agencies built around criminal law.

Any individual would have the right to access data held on them by those
agencies, to appeal to an independent commissioner against that information
being held if access were denied and to have such records destroyed if that
appeal proved successful.

Hopefully, a strong political momentum is building for reform following the
Prism revelations.

But it would be all too easy for this to be dissipated into a series of
superficial "recalibrations" of checks and balances that leave the structure
of the national-security state intact.

For example, a similar sense of outrage followed the European Parliament's
investigation of NSA activities in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

This identified the scale of commercial espionage carried out under the
Echelon programme, whereby US corporations were given access to the
confidential bids and negotiations of EU competitors on international
contracts.

The final report, passed by the European Parliament in September 2001,
condemned the NSA's commercial spying in Europe and resolved that the conduct
of electronic surveillance by US intelligence agencies breached the European
Convention of Human Rights, even when allegedly for law enforcement purposes.

The report gained worldwide media attention, forcing the US authorities
into a rare acknowledgement of the existence of the NSA and its intelligence
functions, while denying that commercial spying was taking place.

But the momentum for reform was lost in the face of these blanket denials
and assertions that secrecy had to be maintained in the interests of national
security.

The stakes now are too high, the accumulation of power even greater and the
threat to democracy so acute that we cannot accept anything other than
root-and-branch reform.

As far as Britain is concerned, the issue is very clear. A national
campaign must build an unignorable demand that NSA Menwith Hill is closed down
before it becomes a fully operational, regional intelligence hub in 2015.

This would signal to the rest of the world that British territory is no
longer being used for NSA operations and that we are ready and willing to work
with others in Europe to rebuild our democratic institutions, enhance our
civil rights and dismantle the national security state.

Let's live in a democracy of hope rather than a tyranny of fear.

Steve Schofield is author of the Yorkshire CND report, 'Lifting The Lid
On Menwith Hill'